Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Emily Alyn Lind in a scene from the motion picture 'Won't Back Down.'

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Set in a gritty Pittsburgh neighborhood, the upcoming Maggie Gyllenhaal/Viola Davis film tells the story of two parents, one of them a teacher, who use a little-known state law to take over their kids' struggling public school. Turns out that such laws actually exist in four states — California, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana — with lawmakers in about a dozen more, including Pennsylvania, expected to consider them over the next year.

First dreamed up by Democratic activist and former Clinton White House staffer Ben Austin, so-called parent trigger laws allow dissatisfied parents to demand changes at their kids' schools — including a total takeover — if a majority sign on.

Details in each state vary, but in California, birthplace of the first trigger law, parents can convert their school into a charter school or force the district to remove staff, including teachers or even a principal. They can also bargain for "different or nuanced changes that will help fix their children's failing school," according to Parent Revolution, the non-profit group that has pushed for parent trigger laws nationwide.

The movie promises to bring such rights squarely into the center of the USA's education discussion this fall, even though the laws have yet to transform a single public school.

Backers hope that will change soon: A California judge last month ruled that the proposed takeover of Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, Calif., could proceed after the local school district challenged it. Parent Revolution hopes to help parents in a similar takeover bid in Compton, Calif.

"At the end of the day, parents are waking up to the fact that, in a fundamental way, many of our schools are failing because they're not designed to succeed," Austin said. "They're not serving the interests of children because they're not designed to — they're designed to serve the interests of adults."

The proposed takeovers have ignited sometimes heated debates, even among parent groups. A bid to introduce a parent trigger in Florida failed last March after the Florida PTA, League of Women Voters and other groups opposed it. Caroline Grannan, a San Francisco public school parent and a founding member of Parents Across America, a union-backed group, said parent trigger laws are a "destructive idea" that amounts to little more than a misguided populist bid to privatize public education.

"It's an illusion that sounds good on paper, even if it was created in sincerity, which I don't believe it was," Grannan said.

Many Bay Area public schools have improved vastly, she said, by offering low-income parents the opportunity to send their child to any city school, effectively desegregating the system. "It really is generally about just changing the population of the school so that it's no longer overwhelmed by such a huge number of high-need kids."

Austin said opponents mischaracterize the movement as pushing for charter schools at any cost. He noted that during his brief tenure on the California State Board of Education, he voted to close "terrible charter schools that I would have never sent my child to," adding, "Bad charter schools are just as bad for kids as bad district schools."

At Desert Trails, he said, parents actually proposed a moderate tweak of the union contract that would give the principal more power to evaluate teachers — parents based it on half a dozen existing union contracts from around the USA. But he also said some schools simply can't be tweaked.

"Sometimes you do just need to press the reset button," he said.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors has endorsed parent triggers and is sponsoring previews of Won't Back Down ahead of its September release. At a screening in Philadelphia last month , former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee praised the film for showing "the complexities of the teacher-quality debates that we are immersed in today."

Produced by Walden Media, best known for The Chronicles of Narnia series and the 2010 schools documentary Waiting for Superman, Won't Back Down opens Sept. 28.

The film paints a picture of an urban school bureaucracy and teachers union as opponents of change, though in a more nuanced way than Superman ever did. Teachers wrestle with their conflicting feelings about unions' vital job protections even as they push for the system to change. In what will likely be the film's most quoted line, a union representative asks, "When did Norma Rae get to be the bad guy?"

Indeed, said Producer Mark Johnson, the classic underdog dramas Norma Rae and Erin Brockovich were inspirations for the new film, which he said was "not meant to be anti-union at all."

"There are some wonderful union teachers in the film and some bad union teachers in the film," he said. "Just because the union exists doesn't mean it's doing its job. And this is going after a union that isn't doing its job."

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